Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking Zoe Gross

Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking Zoe Gross Scatology, for all the sordid formidability the term evokes, is not an especially novel or unusual theme, stylistic technique or descriptor in film or filmic reception. Shit happens – to emphasise both the banality and perva- siveness of the cliché itself – on multiple levels of textuality, manifesting itself in both the content and aesthetic of cinematic texts, and the ways we respond to them. We often refer to “shit films,” using an excremental vo- cabulary redolent of detritus, malaise and uncleanliness to denote their otherness and “badness”. That is, films of questionable taste, aesthetics, or value, are frequently delineated and defined by the defecatory: we describe them as “trash”, “crap”, “filth”, “sewerage”, “shithouse”. When considering cinematic purviews such as the b-film, exploitation, and shock or trash filmmaking, whose narratives are so often played out on the site of the gro- tesque body, a screenscape spectacularly splattered with bodily excess and waste is de rigeur. Here, the scatological is both often on blatant dis- play – shit is ejected, consumed, smeared, slung – and underpining or tinc- turing form and style, imbuing the text with a “shitty” aesthetic. In these kinds of films – which, as their various appellations tend to suggest, are defined themselves by their association with marginality, excess and trash, the underground, and the illicit – the abject body and its excretia not only act as a dominant visual landscape, but provide a kind of somatic, faecal COLLOQUY text theory critique 18 (2009). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue18/gross.pdf ░ Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception 17 grammar for which to discuss the status of these texts as somehow un- clean, forbidden, or distasteful, as cinema’s “dark matter”. In light of this language of refuse, then, where defecation tends to function in a descriptive rather than prescriptive manner, how can an actual cinema of scatology be conceptualised? That is, through what kind of lens can we scrutinise a filmmaking practice which not only displays an em- phatically scatological aesthetic, but more centrally and often literally lo- cates scatology as its subject matter? Furthermore, if the aforementioned “shitty” vernacular speaks of an understanding of the pleasures of certain modes of spectatorship as ambivalent and visceral, what sort of defecatory language, in turn, can be employed to negotiate the hyperbolic tensions of a spectatorial experience whose excessive, oppositional pleasures are just as ambiguous and marginal as shit itself? Of all the bodily terrains located in a cinema already deeply concerned with the unstable body, the scatological realm is the most uncontainable. Fraught with connotations of risk, collapse and disorder, and heavily asso- ciated with the infantile, base, and aberrant, scatology is so unsettling and disruptive because it invokes such a broad spectrum of extreme, unsettling and discordant responses. Scatology, which the philosopher Georges Bataille defines generally as “the science of shit,”1 and interlinks with his theory of heterology, “the science of what is completely other,”2 centralises that which is otherwise denigrated, belittled and repressed. In art, film and literature, it enables the marginal, liminal and excremental to function within a more radically mobile, comedic, performative, and even sacred sphere, in which a “holy shit” can come to be elevated as a kind of scatological sub- lime.3 For Bataille, scatology has a connection with the arcane, alchemical and chthonic, invoking extreme and transformative states ranging from ec- static laughter to the repulsion of horror, likenable to the elevated states of frenzy and rapture invoked in religious rites.4 It is thus much like the nature of excrement itself, comprised of both the mystical and the mundane, the hideous and the holy. Marked by an overpowering sense of ambivalence, the scatological elicits both extreme pleasure and extreme discomfort, as articulated most prominently here in the “morbid train-wreck fascination” evoked so resonantly in trash cinema, teetering the viewer tenuously between horror and hysteria, revulsion and revelry. The spectatorial dynamics of scatological film, then, like shit itself, are multiplicitous, polymorphous and heterogeneous. This paper will thus explore this ambivalent tension of pleasures, ne- gotiating the idea of and possibilities for a scatological spectatorship. Inves- tigating more broadly the idea of scatological art as a form of transgression, I will look at its function as a potentially subversive tool for dehierarchisa- 18 Zoe Gross ░ tion and destabilisation. Scatological art – and in this case, film – operates, as I will examine, to disrupt and break down patriarchal, bourgeois ideas of order, containment, boundary and the body. In its resistance to official, normative authority, scatological film also engenders a corresponding collapse in the spectatorial process itself, threatening to erode the division between spectacle and spectator, the textual and the extra-textual, the body onscreen and the body of the viewer. To this effect, I also want to consider here the idea of a scatological imagination or sensibility which would vitally underpin both the concerns and the (dis)pleasures of scatological film. Trash film, I will argue, looking specifically at the “shit cinema” of sca- tologist par excellence John Waters, is not only ideologically, thematically and aesthetically scatological at its core, but also importantly mobilises and plays with the scatological in often very explicit or literal terms, invoking a potentially radical collapse of order, system and language. Critically centred around and steeped with the scatological, Waters’ work (in particular, Pink Flamingos, which I will mainly focus on here) is especially striking because it actually delights and revels in the scatological, even adulates it as divine. Through Waters’ construction of a kind of scatological microcosm, I will posit that scatology’s dualistic, resistant nature can be itself understood to configure the dynamics of this spectatorial experience. The perverse, ambiguous process of spectatorship elicited by scatological film – or what I will consider here as a kind of scatological gaze – re- flects the concurrently alienating and compelling nature of these films, where aggressive, oppositional states of embodiment onscreen correspond directly with those of the spectator. In contrast to many of the gazes cinematic theory discusses – masochistic, sadistic, perverse or exhibitionistic ones, for instance – the scatological evokes such a dynamic, disorderly scope of responses that it cannot be contained by any single or unifying definition or discourse. My contention, then, is that if scatological film represents a flagrantly resistant, unstable, risky, even dangerous kind of filmmaking in extremis, which negotiates a space for the mobilisation and celebration of trash, shit and “that which is completely other,” it calls for an equally unconventional, idiosyncratic kind of spectatorship which is perhaps as oppositional, excessive and unnerving as these texts themselves. Whilst I do not intend nor have space here to fully propose and outline a new spectatorial model through which to mediate scatology’s heterogeneous pleasures and dynamics, I would rather like to examine how this overarching sense of ambivalence and uncontainability can itself be conceived as a discursive framework with which to theorise scatological film and its broader aesthetic. Scatology has a rich history in comedic, satiric and often resistant ░ Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception 19 forms of cinematic, literary and artistic tradition, in which its simultaneous banality and profanity can function as a form of transgression. “What makes shit such a universal joke,” writes John Berger, “is that it’s an unmis- takeable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and will to glory. It is the ultimate lése-majesté.”5 As Petra ten-Doesschate Chu suggests in her essay on scatological imagery in post-Renaissance Western art, scatological imagery pervades these traditions because of “the power of excrement to arouse laughter and its capacity to shock, repulse and alienate.”6 Since the bawdy tales of Chaucer, the writings of Rabelais (whose language often combined the theological and the excremental), and the satires of Jonathan Swift, writers have utilised scatology as a conduit for the broadening of au- dience response. Because it is focused on base instincts and utter com- monality (what absolutely links all of us more than shit, “that zero-degree of matter”?7), functioning as a metaphor for what is dirty and improper and as a source for irreverent humour, scatology as a literary device “forced a gen- trified response to acknowledge hitherto ignored sections of society.”8 It is this emphasis on liminality and otherness – of that which resides blurrily and seedily in the marginal space between boundaries, in the gut- ter, the underground, the sewer – which most centrally captures the spirit (or, in appropriately bad taste, the flavour) of scatology. Drawing on the work of the Marquis de Sade, the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasse- guet-Smirgel refers to “an anal universe where all differences are abol- ished.”9 Chasseguet-Smirgel conceptualises the libertine

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